Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks by David Whitaker (BBC) | review by Jacob Edwards

Seeing is believing – the BBC is your ser-vant.

Although most Doctor Who fans have a favourite Doctor, for many the choice is as much about era as actor. Style of story, and the broadcast years during which the viewer was of formative age, must go a long way towards shaping this preference.

Assassin’s Creed, by Michael Lesslie, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage (Ubisoft et al.) | review by Jacob Edwards

if you like eagles* flying

if you like lots of fighting

if you like people liable to jump from

the tops of high places

their options like eyelids, unbatted

surviving, unflappable, by means of –

[cut away]

why, i’d say this just might be for you



if you like falcons* flying

and jeremy irons

if you value high orders of god corporate

cluelessness, science divine

in its improbability

plots lines that spew from computer screens

proving the existence of game theory

really, this could be for you



if you like your hawks* flying

if you like your films stylish

if you like your macguffins quite rounded

your heroes brought low

but still bearded, gruff, cut from a mould

if you like all the conflicts to stay unresolved

’til the sequel that’s stealing the plot

well, what ho! this’ll do



if turkeys* are flying, if you stand to decry

but you find yourself writing reviews

with a semblance of rhyme

in the hope your denial won’t show

and that no one will find out you didn’t despise it

console yourself knowing the trailer with matt damon

blank-faced and fighting off dragons in china

probably gave you perspective (false positive)

rose-tinting all you’d expect to find dire



* despite prolonged opportunity, this viewer failed properly to distinguish

The Complete Scarlet Traces, Volume One, by Ian Edgington and Disraeli (Rebellion) | review by Stephen Theaker

Before the films, before the games, before Richard Burton and the brilliant album, and even before the book by H.G. Wells, my first version of The War of the Worlds was a comic strip. It was introduced by Tom Baker’s head in Doctor Who Weekly, though my guess is that it was a reprint from Marvel’s Classics Illustrated. It made a real impact, and yet this adaptation (and then sequel) was even better. I’m sure all of our readers know the story already, but anyway… The astronomer Ogilvy spots great flumes spouting from Mars, just as it is at its closest point to Earth. A great cylinder falls on Horsell Common, then unscrews, and from it emerge first the Martians themselves, and then their weapons, to incinerate humans with as little thought as we would give to swiping at ants on a picnic blanket. It’s crucial for an adaptation of this story to get the horror of these scenes right, and here they are terrifying, Disraeli’s artwork capturing brilliantly the fear on the faces of all those people realising that they no longer rule the world, they no longer even rule Horsell Common. This is pretty much a perfect adaptation to comics of the novel, in my opinion. After that the book moves on to a sequel, ten years later, by the same writer and artist. Again, this is well-trodden territory, though it hasn’t always been trod with great distinction. There were books such as The Nyctalope on Mars (reviewed back in TQF31) and The Space Machine by Christopher Priest (described as dull by its own author), an awful television series, and the overwritten Marvel adventures of Killraven, born in the Martian pens. More recently, Stephen Baxter has written a sequel novel of his own, The Massacre of Mankind. The approach in Crimson Traces is to use new characters in a murder mystery story set in a Britain that has been greatly changed by the war between the worlds, the technology that was left behind by the Martian attack having been cracked open and repurposed to keep the empire running in tip-top shape. While delivering an action-packed thriller, the story also considers the results of automation without social equality. It’s a problem that is likely to only get worse for us, and there’s a warning here about how bad it could get. The sequel reminded me a bit of Bryan Talbot’s equally excellent Grandville series, as it puts some tough, likable characters up against a mystery of national importance and a bunch of vicious villains. Definitely worth your time, even if you think you’ve probably had enough of the Martians and their tripods by now. ****

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This review originally appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #59, which also included stories by Rafe McGregor, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson, David Penn, Elaine Graham-Leigh and Chris Roper.

It | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Cinematic take on King classic needs more Pennywise, less Kumbaya.

Viewer responses to the 1990 miniseries It typically evoke some variation of “not great”. So it was with much fanfare that the film version of Stephen King’s chunky 1986 novel surfaced. According to both critics and the general audiences, the film has lived up to the hype.

Now out: Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #60!

free epub | free mobi | free pdf | print UK | print USA | Kindle UK | Kindle US

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #60 is now available! It contains five stories: “The Lost Testament” by Rafe McGregor, “Turning Point” by Nicki Robson, “Yttrium, Part One” by Douglas Thompson, “Amongst the Urlap” by Andrew Peters, and “Doggerland” by Jule Owen. The wraparound cover is by Howard Watts, and the editorial answers the most urgent queries in Richard Herring’s Emergency Questions. The issue also includes almost forty pages of reviews by Douglas J. Ogurek, Rafe McGregor and Stephen Theaker.

They review books by Martha Wells, Lisa Tuttle, Mira Grant, Gwyneth Jones, Jim Butcher, Skottie Young and Michael Turner, plus the films Alien: Covenant, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, It Comes at Night, The Mummy, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Prometheus, and Wonder Woman, the album Humanz by Gorillaz, the tv shows Iron Fist and Legion, and a pair of events: Eastercon 2017: Innominate (or at least two days of it), and Into the Unknown, the exhibition at the Barbican.

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Here are the kind and beautiful contributors to this issue:

Andrew Peters is an Egypt-based financial writer, who has recently started to publish fiction. His short story “In Dogpoo Park” was chosen as Editor’s Pick in the Aestas 2016 Short Story Competition run by Fabula Press, and was published in an anthology this year. Some of his flash fiction will also be appearing in the 2017 Fish Anthology, having been chosen in competition.

Douglas J. Ogurek’s work has appeared in the BFS Journal, The Literary Review, Morpheus Tales, Gone Lawn, and several anthologies. Douglas’s website can be found at www.douglasjogurek.weebly.com.

Douglas Thompson won the Herald/Grolsch Question of Style Award in 1989, 2nd prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007, and the Faith/Unbelief Poetry Prize in 2016. His short stories and poems have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, including Ambit, New Writing Scotland and Albedo One. His first book, Ultrameta, published by Eibonvale Press in August 2009, was followed by eight subsequent novels and short story collections: Sylvow (Eibonvale Press, 2010), Apoidea (The Exaggerated Press, 2011), Mechagnosis (Dog Horn Publishing, 2012), Entanglement (Elsewhen Press, 2012), The Rhymer (Elsewhen Press, 2014), The Brahan Seer (Acair Books, 2014), Volwys (Dog Horn Publishing, 2014), and The Sleep Corporation (The Exaggerated Press, 2015). A new combined collection of short stories and poems The Fallen West will be published by Snuggly Books in late 2017/early 2018. His first poetry collection Eternity’s Windfall will be published by Red Squirrel in early 2018. A retrospective collection of his earlier poetry, Soured Utopias, will be published by Dog Horn in late 2018. “Yttrium: Part One” is taken from his novel Barking Circus, forthcoming in 2018 from Eibonvale. Part Two of “Yttrium” will be published in TQF61.

Howard Watts is a writer, artist and composer living in Seaford. He provides the wraparound cover art for this issue, his thirtieth consecutive cover for us in the span of eight years. His artwork can be seen in its native resolution on his DeviantArt page: http://hswatts.deviantart.com. His novel The Master of Clouds is available on Kindle.

Jule Owen was born and raised in Merseyside and now lives in London. By day she is a practising digital technologist, working on products that involve machine learning and automation, by night she writes stories about future and other worlds

Nicki Robson writes fantasy and horror fiction. She has had short stories placed in competitions run by the British Fantasy Society and others published in anthologies from Twilight Tales in the US. She is based in Yorkshire and is currently working on a YA fantasy novel.

Rafe McGregor is the author of The Value of Literature, The Architect of Murder, five collections of short fiction, and over one hundred magazine articles, journal papers, and review essays. He lectures at the University of York and can be found online at @rafemcgregor.

Stephen Theaker is the co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. He apologises for this issue being three months late, but expects the next one to be along quite soon.

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Back issues of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction are usually available for free download. However, Dropbox have just turned off their public folders function (they did warn me!), so unfortunately the download links for free epub, mobi and pdf copies of the back issues won't work till I rebuild them.

A Wizard’s Henchman by Matthew Hughes (PS Publishing) | review by Stephen Theaker

For those readers who have had the immense pleasure of reading several of this author’s Archonate books, A Wizard’s Henchman is simply unmissable. Over many short stories, novellas and novels we have been shown a universe on the point of collapse, rapidly approaching the point at which reality will flip, from being based like ours (one hopes) on scientific principles to being ruled instead by magic, or, to be more precise, by the will. Some books have shown magic bleeding through, and others have even taken us into the future for a brief glimpse of what is to come, but this is where it actually happens! It is very abrupt. Flying cars fall out of the sky. Buildings collapse. People starve. But not our protagonist. Knowing a little bit about what is going to happen, he gloms on to a promising candidate for wizardship and keeps him safe while he prepares and later learns to use his new powers. Less pleasant magic users are also making their play, and the denizens of other dimensional planes are also ready to take advantage of the new status quo. The book offers a comfortingly familiar mix of science fiction, fantasy and mystery, while never being reluctant to offer a shocking image or idea when appropriate. It gives us a protagonist for whom self-preservation is at first a priority, but who grows in stature into a true hero, in large part thanks to his determination to adapt and learn. A brilliant book, probably my favourite new book of 2016. *****

Resurrecting Sunshine, by Lisa A. Koosis (Albert Whitman) | review by Jacob Edwards

As human as it gets.

The rest of the world knew her as Sunshine but to Adam she was Marybeth, the love of his troubled adolescence. Behind the alter ego, beyond the music and the fame, Marybeth meant everything to Adam; and when Sunshine died she took Marybeth with her. Adam’s life fell apart.

But what if he could bring her back? What if his memories could help resurrect Sunshine in a clone body? He would give anything, wouldn’t he?

But will it really be Marybeth? Will having her back take the pain away?

The more Adam commits to the procedure, the more he starts to wonder if maybe Marybeth’s death came a long time before Sunshine’s…

I first happened upon Lisa A. Koosis when editing for Andromeda Spaceways. Her story “Soul Blossom” was sad and beautiful. As soon as I read it I knew hers was a name to look out for.

Resurrecting Sunshine returns to the same themes as “Soul Blossom” – loss; grief; hope beyond death – but gives them a book-length treatment, aimed at teens but no less profound in the telling. As an adult reader I found myself intrigued, drawn in and then taken by the story’s flow. (As a reviewer I’d usually try for some kind of simile at this point, but it feels wrong; Koosis’s writing calls out to stand by itself.) The novel is perfectly paced. I read it in three sittings, each longer than the last yet seeming to go faster. There was a sense of inevitability to the narrative, but not predictability. When the ending came, it brought closure.

In her acknowledgments Koosis describes Resurrecting Sunshine as “the book that would not die”. This suggests also a book that didn’t want to be born; a story that came but grudgingly into the world; and yet, whatever difficulties it posed the author, the end result is seamless. In fact, it is Koosis’s obvious investment in her work that makes it so compelling. Underlying the spec-fic “now” tale is a heartfelt backstory whose gradual emergence brings a depth of emotion so lacking in most teen novels. All the characters feel genuine. They’re not just there to tell a story; they’re living through one.

Resurrecting Sunshine is written in the present tense from a first-person male perspective. Koosis handles this well, as does she that fine balancing act between keeping the reader guessing and allowing the book to retain its integrity. Resurrecting Sunshine is a profound, beguiling debut that transcends genre to resonate with yearnings deep within. Buy it for yourself and then buy a copy for someone you love. Because this is as human as it gets…

And wouldn’t you do anything?

Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling (Tachyon Publications) | review by Stephen Theaker

This novella tells an alternate history story based on the anarcho-syndicalist republic that was declared in the formerly Italian city of Fiume, a city where “there were more great world causes to fight about than there were men to represent them”, that was to become part of Yugoslavia after the first world war. In our reality the republic fell after fifteen months, but in this story a clever and capable engineer, Lorenzo Secondari, having been revived from death by a medical experimenter’s “psychically advanced séance”, arrives in the city in time to get its weapons factories up and running again. They had been taken over by female workers, including the formidable Frau Fifer, who becomes a companion of Secondari. As a result of his successes, Secondari rises to become “Minister of Vengeance Weapons”, the original title of Pirate Engineer being rejected as not quite right. Eventually Harry Houdini shows up, a secret ambassador from the United States, accompanied by Robert Howard and a surprisingly chipper H.P. Lovecraft. I really liked one bit of dialogue from Secondari, when he says, “I don’t have to believe any more, because it’s the truth!” I’ve often thought that when someone says they believe in a thing, that can be a sign that they don’t think it’s actually true (or at least isn’t true yet), whether they realise that or not. I enjoyed the book while finding it a bit hard to get to grips with, much like Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius and Oswald Bastable books. The book also contains an introduction by Warren Ellis, an interview with Bruce Sterling, a useful afterword by Christopher Brown, and a note by the cover artist, all of which, while interesting and often educational, does make you wish the story itself was a bit longer. ****

Annabelle: Creation | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Well-choreographed scares without the long wait.

Watching Annabelle: Creation, the latest installment in The Conjuring (2013) universe, is kind of like going to an amusement park with thrill rides. While you’re waiting in line, not much is happening. These are typically the scenes in which characters are talking. But then, there are the times when you experience the exhilaration of the ride. In this film, directed by David F. Sandberg, it’s when you’re looking into a dark space, focusing on an inanimate figure, or hiding with a character as something approaches. At both the park and the theater, the overall experience depends on how long the lines are. Fortunately, unlike its immediate predecessor Annabelle (2014) and more like The Conjuring, the pre-prequel Annabelle: Creation doesn’t make one wait long to get on the rides . . . and there are quite a few.

Metronome by Oliver Langmead (Unsung Stories) | review by Stephen Theaker

William Manderlay, an elderly man living in a care home, meets a Sleepwalker, March, a hunter of nightmares, in one of his dreams. March lends William his special dream compass, and tells him to go to the Capital of dreams, to chill out while March gets on with clearing out the bad dreams that are infesting his noggin. As well as helping him find his way, the compass can show whether people he meets in this world are other dreamers or just figments. Unfortunately, he runs into June, another Sleepwalker who wants to get to Solomon’s Eye, whatever that is, and for that purpose she needs a copy of the songs that William never got around to recording for his big hit album. They will provide her with directions. Eventually William gets involved in a rival quest, on board the Metronome, a clockwork-powered flying craft whose captain is willing to take him in pursuit of those stolen songs, because they happen to be the map to the centre of the storm where she lost the rest of her crew. This a nicely written piece of work, with plenty of ideas and a beautiful cover, but it didn’t really excite me. It feels unfair to say that I feel like I’ve read plenty of airship stories now, when I wouldn’t say the same thing about car stories or spaceship stories, but some of the beats did feel quite familiar from books like Empress of the Sun and Clementine. The portrayal of William in his old age is very touching, as his reaction to finding himself increasingly youthful again in the course of the dream quest. It was pleasant enough, and I’m sure there are people out there who will be more in tune with it than I was. ***

Letters to Arkham: The Letters of Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth, 1961–1971, edited by S.T. Joshi (PS Publishing) | review by Stephen Theaker

This book collects the correspondence (or so much of it as remains) from the 1960s between the prolific writer and editor August Derleth and the young Ramsey Campbell. The latter would go on to be a titan of the horror world, and the former already was, his publishing of H.P. Lovecraft’s work in hardback having done a great deal to cement that writer’s reputation. The letters are often fascinating. Campbell, fifteen at first, is importunate, full of questions – reminding us that this was a time when you couldn’t simply look things up on the internet – a virgin, somewhat testy and defensive. August Derleth, much older, is sexually omnivorous, patronising, encouraging, and exceedingly free with his opinions. One thing I had noted reading Derleth’s pastoral Sac Prairie Journal immediately before this is that August Derleth’s romantic life is completely absent from its pages, and these letters make it obvious why: he was having it off with whoever he could! Given that the letters are remarkably revealing, it’s a credit to Ramsey Campbell and to the literary estate of August Derleth that their publication was allowed. That the book would be edited by Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi must have helped in that regard, and he provides very useful footnotes to the letters, supplying information about everything from incorrect film titles (there is a great deal of film chat) to whether planned titles from both writers were ever published, and if so in what form and under what titles. One of their favourite topics of conversation is films, and reading the book now, when so much of cinema’s rich history is available for a few pounds and a couple of clicks, it’s almost shaming to see the lengths to which the two of them go to watch really good films, travelling for hours to get to a particular cinema on the one night that film would be shown. Since reading the book I’ve certainly been making more of an effort to watch better quality films. It’s essential reading for fans of either writer, and very interesting reading for everyone else. ****

X-Men: Legacy by Simon Spurrier, Tan Eng Huat and chums (Marvel) | review by Stephen Theaker

This twenty-four issue series, which ran from 2012 to 2014 and is available in its entirety to subscribers on Marvel Unlimited, as well as in four collections, tells the story of David Haller, the son of Professor Charles Xavier and an Israeli diplomat. He is known to the world at large as Legion, and though he isn’t keen on that name (he’d be really annoyed that it’s the title of the new television show based on the comic), it accurately reflects his powers: like Crazy Jane of the Doom Patrol, he has many split personalities, each of them with its own powers.

When he’s in control, he can use those powers. When they’re in control, the results can be disastrous. This series begins at the point in Avengers vs X-Men when something terrible happens to Professor Xavier at the hands of one of his friends, and that totally shatters David’s control, as well as giving rise to a malignant and powerful new personality that resembles his father. Over the course of the comic David will try to re-establish control of his own mind, take a pre-emptive approach to mutant hate crimes, start astral dating Blindfold of the X-Men, and try to prevent an apocalyptic prophecy of his future from coming true.

It’s interesting to see Marvel trying something like this. It is a bit like the original Vertigo comics – Shade the Changing Man, say – both in tone, and style, and in that a lot of the stories stem from David’s own problems in keeping his powers in check; if he’s not the big bad in each story, there’s always the danger that he might be. The television programme will probably need to be less all about him, but it worked well for the comic. ***

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This review originally appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #59, which also included stories by Rafe McGregor, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson, David Penn, Elaine Graham-Leigh and Chris Roper.

I Am Providence, by Nick Mamatas (Night Shade Books) | review by Stephen Theaker

A horror book, or maybe literary horror fantasy. Lovecraftian fans, critics and writers gather in Providence, Rhode Island, at a hotel for a convention, the Summer Tentacular. To me it sounded very reminiscent of the first FantasyCons I attended (i.e. lots of blokes, lots of names familiar from the internet, and lots of people trying to sell their books; here, we almost immediately meet a chap hawking Madness of the Death Sun – which sounds great), while to newcomer Colleen Danzig it resembles a large Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, “except instead of alcoholism the attendees had all sorts of other, subtler problems”. Some of those people feel very familiar, but even if you aren’t well enough acquainted with that particular scene to identify the people being parodied, you get the gist of why someone would want to parody them. We have two point of view characters – Panossian, an older writer who gets himself murdered, and Colleen, who wants to investigate his murder – and chapters alternate between them. The dead (or “posthumously conscious” as he puts it) man tells his story in the first person, and his view of this environment soured long before he was killed there. Fandom is the social network of last resort, he says. Lovecraftians are a bunch of misfits and social defectives. Literary critics and fans are two of the more ridiculous sets of people in the world. Ambition is a hell. And he admits to having been a jerk to a lot of people – a lot of very mentally unstable people. Asked for his thoughts on writing, his answer is, “Generally, I’m against it.” He’s rather brilliant and very entertaining, much like the book itself. ****

Princess Jellyfish 01, by Akiko Higashimura (Kodansha) | review by Stephen Theaker

This 388pp manga collects episodes one to twelve in the story of an unhappily single Japanese woman, Tsukimi, and the geeky friends with whom she lives, and how her life changes completely when she meets a very glamorous young man. It’s rather like The Big Bang Theory in reverse. She calls herself a fujoshi, which means (rather nastily) rotten woman – a woman who follows her enthusiasms rather than trying to fulfil her expected role as a mother or wife. There’s no magical or fantastical element in this book, it turned out; it’s called Princess Jellyfish because she is a jellyfish geek (a phase the author talks about going through herself in the biographical comments). That’s what gets her talking to her gorgeous new friend: he brings his stylishness to bear in helping her save a dying jellyfish in a pet shop, just as later he will try to save Tsukimi and her friends from losing their home to property development. He’s the first boy she’s talked to since elementary school, and what gets her over that barrier at first is that she doesn’t realise he’s a boy: he likes to dress as a girl. It’s a sweet and romantic comic, with an adorable lead character and likeable love interests, and it’s an eye-opening portrayal of gender fluidity in Japanese culture. The backgrounds are sketchy, but the character artwork is highly expressive . Unfortunately, at the publisher’s choice, this Comixology edition can only be viewed a full page at a time (described as “Manga Fixed Format”). Not a problem on a tablet, but you’d struggle to read it on your phone. ***

The Four Thousand, The Eight Hundred by Greg Egan (Subterranean Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

In this tense science fiction novella, there is strife on Vesta. Back when the colony was first being established, each of the founding families contributed different resources. Problem is, attitudes to private ownership of intellectual property have changed so much since then that the family that bought into the project with its patents and inventions is now regarded by some as having stolen its share, and a proposal to have them pay it back is, unthinkably, passed, with 52% voting in favour. Some put up with this discrimination, some decide to fight back, and some flee, either in passenger ships, or if the security forces are after them, via a space age underground railroad to Ceres, drugged, half-frozen, and hitching a ride on a rock slab. All of this will put Anna, only a week or so into her new job, in an impossible position, when a cruiser, the Arcas, is sent in pursuit of fugitives. It feels like a long short story rather than a short novel, but I enjoyed it very much, and it is of course remarkably topical, in that we too are experiencing what happens when a substantial minority of the populace is railroaded by a narrow popular vote rooted in prejudice and selfishness and hatred. The book does a terrific job of showing how that can happen, and how shocking it can be when it does. ***

The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove (Titan Books) | review by Rafe McGregor

I’ve recently made several comments on the evolution of Sherlock Holmes from the cold criminal investigator who calmly rejected supernatural explanations of even the most outré circumstances created by Conan Doyle to a character who is probably most accurately called an occult detective in the twenty-first century. In my review of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride in TQF55, I mentioned that Holmes and several others who cross the threshold of 221b Baker Street are more akin to superheroes and supervillains, giving the series very much of a fantasy feel, and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011) was served with a deliciously strong steampunk sauce. I recently responded to an article in The Conversation on the decline in the popularity of Doctor Who by noting that Doctor Who and Sherlock have become increasingly close in the last couple of decades and Steven Moffat is one of many writers who have written either official novels or screenplays for both the doctor and the detective. In my review of Simon Kurt Unsworth’s The Devil’s Detective in TQF56, I mentioned “the many failed and few successful attempts to combine Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos” of late, and the subject of this review is James Lovegrove’s contribution to precisely that subgenre – a contribution that is by and large successful. The subgenre was launched with Michael Reeves and John Pelan’s Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! in 2003. Re-reading my somewhat scathing review in TQF24, I stand by most of what I wrote (though not my dismissal of Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”). One of my main criticisms of this volume was that there had been little or no effort to recreate the atmosphere of Victorian or Edwardian London in most of the stories. The shadows are, after all, over Baker Street, not Angell Street or Clinton Street. James Lovegrove’s shadows are, as his title suggests, in Shadwell (the district between Whitechapel and Limehouse), and he has paid close attention to both the historical setting and the original Holmes stories such that the few anachronistic turns of phrase he uses are insufficient to distract the reader. It’s the relationship between old and new where Lovegrove’s contribution to literary pastiche is revealed at its most ambitious and most promising.

Nominations for the British Fantasy Awards 2017

The British Fantasy Awards nominees have been announced for 2017, and it's the first time since 2012 that our magazine and its contents have been eligible, thanks to me stepping down as awards administrator last September.

Sadly, though, fate did not hear our call, and we did not receive any nominations, although I do contribute on average a page per issue to one of the best magazine nominees, Interzone, edited by the apparently tireless Andy Cox, so I'll be celebrating that while the rest of the TQF team weep into their teacups. Andy's equally fine Black Static, to which I occasionally contribute a review (albeit not last year), also received a nomination.

The other magazine nominated was Uncanny Magazine, a first-time nominee which I haven't read, but which looks very interesting. There are also first-time nominations in this category for Tor.com and Ginger Nuts of Horror, both websites which don't style themselves as magazines or periodicals – they don't publish in issues, for example – so it's a bit of a surprise to see them on the list. But the BFAs often follow the voters' heads in this kind of thing: see for example how the best small press award morphed over the years from being an award for small press publications to being an award for the small presses themselves.

The full list of nominees is here. Congratulations to all of them!

Scroll down to the bottom and you'll see that I'm a juror on the best comic/graphic novel category, and the work for that kicked off when we were appointed on June 24. I was glad to find I'd already read 29 graphic novels and comics collections from the relevant year, and I read another dozen or so highly-recommended books in the course of us deciding whether to add egregious omissions to the list. In the end, we added two to the four put forward by the voters of the British Fantasy Society and FantasyCon. Now I'm reading and re-reading all the nominees, but I know already that it's going to be a very tough decision.

Not going to say much about the other categories, since there's a lot of overlap between juries, so I might be seen as having inside information about the juries I'm not on. (I don't – I didn't even know my fellow comics jurors were on a couple of other juries, or that my all-male jury wasn't the only one, until yesterday's announcement.) It does seem a bit of a shame that the best horror novel, best fantasy novel and best artist juries decided not to add any items to their shortlists, given all the work out there deserving of awards recognition, but maybe the jurors were deadlocked on what to add.

A Wizard's Henchman was my favourite book of last year, so I'd hoped it might get a nomination in best fantasy novel. I'd also had hopes for Glen Weldon's The Caped Crusade in best non-fiction and A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson in best novella, and it was a big surprise to see that Central Station by Lavie Tidhar didn't make the best collection list – perhaps its votes were split between people voting for it as a novel, and people voting for it as a collection?

If I'm not picking out my favourite works from female writers there, that's because they made the shortlists: overall nine of the thirty-nine items I voted for made it on, a pretty good batting average! It's definitely worth using all of your votes. The plan is for winners to be announced at FantasyCon 2017, in Peterborough. Memberships of the convention and tickets for the awards banquet are available here. Good luck to everyone!

A Taste of Honey, by Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com) | review by Stephen Theaker

An interesting and romantic novella, in which Aqib, a young and good-looking member of the Olorumi minor nobility with a special way with animals, falls for a rough soldier from the Daluçan embassy. Forbidden and sweaty things happen, to their mutual delight, but it is important to his family that he makes the right marriage, and so when the opportunity for one arises he must choose between love and duty, happiness and family. As the story progresses we are also shown episodes from progressively deeper into his future life, placing ever more weight upon the decision he will have to make. This was a very well-written, exciting and romantic book; the relationships of Aqib with both his lover and his other significant other are tender and believable. Using an extremely famous literary title for another book always seems a bit odd (see also Signal to Noise and Journal of the Plague Year), but the story works hard to justify it. A word for the evocative cover art: fantasy and science fiction book covers often feature great design, but it’s brilliant to see that not every publisher has given up on illustrative artwork. ****

Sherlock, Series 4, by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (BBC One) | review by Rafe McGregor

Like Conan Doyle, who famously tired of his creation, the BBC seem curiously reluctant to represent Sherlock Holmes on the small screen. Compare Sherlock, which began in 2010, with CBS’s Elementary, which began in 2012: the former has a total of thirteen episodes across four seasons (I’ll use the American term to distinguish an individual season from the series as a whole); the latter is, at the time of writing, in its fifth season and will have aired a total of 109 episodes by the time this review is in print. In addition to the British tendency to disguise mini-series as series, writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat seem intent on frustrating our enjoyment of the Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) and Martin Freeman (Watson) partnership in a way that Robert Doherty does not with Jonny Lee Miller (Holmes) and Lucy Liu (Watson) in Elementary. Season 1 ended with Holmes and Watson about to blow up, season 2 with Holmes’ faked suicide leaving Watson bereft, and season 3 with Holmes exiled to certain death. Ominously, the final episode of season 4 is called “The Final Problem” and it is telling that Doyle’s story of the same name – his half-hearted attempt to kill off Holmes after 26 episodes – is the only original case to have inspired two of the TV adaptations.

Spectral, by George Nolfi (Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

James Badge Dale (24, The Pacific) here plays Clyne, a character quite similar to the chap he played in the underwatched spy show Rubicon. There he was an extremely intelligent analyst who grew concerned about the patterns he was beginning to see, and he stayed for the most part in his office. Here, on the other hand, he is an extremely intelligent engineer who gets pulled away from his usual work at a DARPA lab to address a problem in the field. There is a civil war in Moldova, at some point in what appears to be the near future, and American peacekeepers on the ground have been seeing things through the special goggles he created: spectral things. And now the things have started to kill, leaving victims flash frozen. Once there, he meets CIA analyst Emily Mortimer and chap in charge Bruce Greenwood, and applies himself to the job. He confirms that whatever they are, they aren’t glitches in his goggles, just in time for a massive surge in their numbers. As the city falls to their attack, Clyne must work with the surviving troops to track the spectrals to their source. This is a really good little film, with an excellent cast, sort of what you might expect the Syfy channel to produce if they weren’t pumping out deliberate rubbish (enjoyable as that can sometimes be). It’s directed very nicely by Nic Mathieu, and could easily have justified itself as a cinema release, although you know that if it had been, bigger stars would probably have been cast, their pay packets requiring the movie to be more of a traditional blockbuster, and it wouldn’t have been the same. It never feels cheap (it feels not unlike a big budget Asian film), the spectrals have a interesting origin, and James Badge Dale makes a very likeable lead. It’s great that the economics of Netflix made a film like this possible, and I hope there’s more of the kind to come. ***